Houston Police: Missing $1 Million Renoir May Be Leaving Country

"Madeleine Leaning on Her Elbow with Flowers in Her Hair" (1918) by Renoir.

A $1 million Renoir painting plucked from a Houston home by an armed robber earlier this month remains at large, and local police officials now tell press that they believe that the work may be on its way out of the country. Details for the reasoning behind that suspicious have not been released.

ABC News in Houston reported that the work, a 1918 painting titled Madeleine Leaning on Her Elbow with Flowers in Her Hair, was stolen by a white man wearing a ski mask and sporting a semiautomatic gun earlier this month.

“It’s a Renoir painting. It’s highly recognizable.” Katherine Cabaniss, the executive director of the Crime Stoppers crime-fighting organization in Houston, told the television station, warning the robber. “Someone who’s in possession of that property can easily be identified.”

As The Observerreported earlier this year, it is difficult, but not altogether impossible, for criminals to sell stolen artworks. Stay tuned.